I bought an Optiplex 5040, with an i5-6500TE, and 8 GB DDR3L RAM.
When I bought it, I installed Fedora Server on it. It got stuck every few days but I could never see the error. The services just stopped working, I couldn’t ssh into it, and connecting it to a monitor showed a black screen.
So, I thought let’s install Ubuntu Server, maybe Fedora isn’t compatible with all of its hardware. The same thing is happening, now, but I can see this error. Even when there’s nothing installed on it, no containers, nothing other than base packages, this happens.
I have updated the bios. I have tried setting nouveau.modeset=0 in the grub config file. I have tried disabling and enabling c-states. No luck till now.
Would really appreciate if anyone helps me with this.
UPDATE:
- I cleaned everything and reapplied the thermal paste. I did not see any change in the thermals. It never goes over 55°C even under full load.
- I reset the motherboard by removing that jumper thing.
- I ran
memtest86, which took over 2½ hours. It did not show any errors. - I ran a CPU stress test for over 15 hours, and nothing crashed.
- I also ran the Dell’s diagnostic tool, available in the boot menu of the motherboard. The whole test took over 2 hours but did not show any errors. It tested the memory, CPU, fans, storage drives, etc.
Seen this before, and almost always has to do with hardware failure or bad hardware config.
Reset the BIOS/CMOS jumper on the board, go back into BIOS setup and set the proper time. Do not touch the CPU or Memory timings. Boot with the defaults and see if it still happens. Check and update the BIOS if there is a newer version as well.
Next longer steps: test memory, then stress test the CPU. I’d be shocked if it was a storage issue as I haven’t seen that be the culprit, but might was well run the long SMART tests.
Yeah, always check all of this stuff. Server hardware gets a lot more updates than like gamer board BIOS, companies invest high millions, even low billions in this stuff and they expect problems to be address promptly for that kind of cash.
Check for any peripherals or cards, too. RAID, backplanes, networking cards; drivers, firmware, anything.
Had the same issues, it was heat.
Cool down your server, add a fan or a cooler…
I added a usb-powered fan sucking cooler air from outside the server area directly blowing it on the chassis.
That fixed for me.
That server sounds a bit older in the teeth… Has new thermal paste been applied to the cpu? Even if the reported temps are under 90c, you might be getting hot spots causing glitches inside the package.
Worth trying a couple of different generations of kernel as well, both newer and older. You might be hitting a regression somewhere.
Try running memtest86 for a few days to test memory. That is fairly easy to do though it involves booting from a flash drive. Web search should find info.
I just ran it. It took over 2 hours to finish. Showed no errors. Is there a benefit of running it for a few days?
Time to add a cron job to auto reboot it once a day
